Racked is no longer publishing. Thank you to everyone who read our work over the years. The archives will remain available here; for new stories, head over to Vox.com, where our staff is covering consumer culture for The Goods by Vox. You can also see what we’re up to by signing up here.
LBDs may be the simplest, safest outfit option you keep hanging in your closet. But the history of the little black dress suggests they weren’t always so simple: In the west, up until the early 1900s, black dresses were worn exclusively as mourning attire after a woman’s husband had died.
Ironically, that turned black dresses into a signal to onlookers: This woman is newly single, and she’s not a virgin. Oh, and she was respectable enough to have been married in the first place.
Which, at the time, was pretty alluring to men. Thus black dresses became an inherently sexy fashion choice, even when the hemlines and sleeves were long.
Of course, once those hemlines did start rising, as with Princess Diana’s black “revenge dress,” LBDs contained a whole other level of sex appeal.
Follow Racked on YouTube for more videos | Like Racked on Facebook to never miss a video